A good read on the ugly details behind those benign-sounding universal background checks…
Editor’s Note: The following was written by our friend, colleague, and long-time 2A advocate Michael Bane.
I mean, who can oppose universal background checks? Well, me for one, but as I live in a UBC state, Colorado, it doesn’t make any difference.
However, in the fight against UBCs in Colorado in 2013, we all learned a lot about the concepts of universal background checks, and virtually all of it is bad.
For a start, UBCs really aren’t really designed to do what they say, that is, provide for a background check for every firearms sale. Rather, UBCs are designed to “criminalize” actions that we in the gun culture take for granted and are of quite literally no consequence.
The best way to sum up UBCs is that they are designed to change the definition of possession of a firearm from the current definition used by BATFE and pretty much everyone with more than three working brain cells — “ownership” — to “physical possession” of the firearm. Here’s how that would work under the UBC rules as drafted by Michael Bloomberg’s “law fare” group (which we were able to prove in Colorado).
